Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Semper Fi" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 11, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards they showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Semper Fi,” dealing with Detective Elliott Stabler’s dysfunctional family – his mom Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn bringing warmth and depth to a pretty stereotyped character) is going crazy and driving everyone else around her nuts with her forgetfulness and other signs of age-related dementia. Stabler’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris) is a life-long hustler who’s lived his life on the thin edge of the law without quite going over. His younger brother Joe (Michael Trotter) served with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where he became addicted to the local black-tar heroin and brought back his habit and his contacts when he returned to the U.S. Elliott Stabler discovers his younger brother’s drug use when he finds a piece of foil in his trash after a family reunion in his apartment, notices the residue and wonders whether Joe is just snorting the drug or actually shooting up. Randall suggests the two do an intervention on Joe – which begins badly when Randall gets a maid at Joe’s building to let them into his apartment despite Elliott’s cop-trained aversion to doing a warrantless search and finding evidence that would be useless in court. They find Joe’s stash and his works (the paraphernalia he uses to inject himself), and when Joe comes home unexpectedly they confront him, which goes wretchedly when Joe announces he’s walking out and there’s nothing they can do to stop him. Joe goes to Bernadette’s home demanding that she give him her “rainy-day money” so he can score heroin, avoid withdrawal and get high, but it turns out she’s used the money already to buy a PlayStation video-game console for one of her nieces. Joe then steals one of his mom’s prize trophies, a plastic-encased baseball autographed by Mickey Mantle, obviously intending to sell it and use the money to buy drugs.

Stabler, not only out of consideration for his brother’s plight but because he is a cop, after all, and one whose specialty is supposed to be organized crime, launches an investigation to determine how black tar heroin is being smuggled into the U.S. and who’s behind it. He infiltrates a support group for former U.S. servicemembers led by a wheelchair-using vet named Darian Morse (Tobias Forrest, who I’m presuming actually uses a wheelchair because his promotional photo, his test reel on imdb.com and a trailer for his best-known previous role on the series How I Got Away with Murder all show him in a wheelchair) which offers its more wounded members clandestine help in dealing with their pain pharmaceutically. Elliott learns that the drugs are being distributed under the cover of a bee farm called Mama Boone’s that sells organic honey and bee pollen capsules. He manages to infiltrate the operation, only Mama Boone (Lois Smith) not only rules the farm with an iron hand but allows her son Angus (Stephen Lang) to run it like a combination boot camp and prison work farm. Posing as a homeless veteran, Stabler gets admitted to the farm and is shown the ropes by Trisha (Rivera Reese), an ultra-butch Mohawk-haired woman who’s either Mama’s daughter or her grand-niece, it’s not certain which. Stabler is told that he has to surrender his cell phone – he’s staying in a bunk room with a bunch of other guys – and he’s not allowed out of the bunk house after sunset. Unable to reach him by phone, two of Stabler’s colleagues on the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez) and Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), show up at Mama Boone’s farm pretending to be a couple interested in buying some of their honey. They take him aside and offer him the chance to bail on the assignment because Stabler’s commanding officer, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is worried about how secure the assignment is and whether anybody in the Boone operation might be on to him, but being the Elliott Stabler we’ve grown to know, love and obsess about throughout his years in the Dick Wolf Universe, he damns the consequences and goes on full speed ahead.

The episode builds to the sort of cliff-hanger ending Wolf and his writers (here, John Shiban and Katie Letien) use regularly on this show, which alone of all Wolf’s productions worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL instead of making each episode a complete story with a beginning, middle and end (though the writers of this year’s SVU shows have dropped a big hint about the child abduction of Maddie Flynn that Benson has been obsessing about all season, saying that a principal witness against the defendant has just been knifed to death by fellow inmates at Rikers Island, so the creep may go free after all), but overall this was a pretty good Organized Crime episode and it helps that this time the principal villains are whites. Indeed, Mama Boone gets a great speech to the effect that members of her family have been fighting for the United States since before we were a country, including both participating in the American Revolution and later fighting against George Washington in the Whiskey Rebellion. Are we supposed to believe that Daniel Boone was part of this family?